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All of us suffer from complacency to one extent or another. We know intellectually that bad things can happen to us, but when days, months and years go by with no serious adverse incidents arising, we tend to lose all visceral fear of harm. We may even become contemptuous of danger and resentful of all the resources and worry we expend in aid of problems that never seem to manifest themselves. But this is a dangerous attitude to fall into. When serious problems strike the complacent and unprepared, the result is inevitably shock followed by panic. And hindsight teaches us that decisions made during such agitated states are almost always the wrong ones. This is true on the institutional level as well.

During my years in the information security industry, I have seen a number of organizations founder when struck by their first serious information security incident. I’ve seen them react slowly, I’ve seen them throw money and resources into the wrong solutions, and I’ve seen them suffer regulatory and legal sanctions that they didn’t have to incur. And after the incident has been resolved, I’ve also seen them all put their incident response programs in order; they never want to have it happen again! So why not take a lesson from the stricken and put your program in order before it happens to your organization too? Preparing your organization for an information security incident isn’t really very taxing. It only takes two things: planning and practice.

When undertaking incident response planning, the first thing to do is to examine the threat picture. Join user groups and consult with other similar organizations to see what kinds of information security incidents they have experienced. Take advantage of free resources such as the Verizon Data Breach Reports and US-CERT. The important thing is to limit your serious preparations to the top several most credible incident types you are likely to encounter. This streamlines the process, lessens the amount of resources you need to put into it and makes it more palatable to the personnel that have to implement it.

Once you have determined which threats are most likely to affect your organization, the next step is to fully document your incident response plan. Now this appears to be a daunting task, but in reality there are many resources available on the Internet that can help guide you through the process. Example incident response plans, procedures and guidance are available from SANS, FFIEC, NIST and many other reputable organizations free of charge. I have found that the best way to proceed is to read through a number of these resources and to adapt the parts that seem to fit your particular organization the best. Remember, your incident response plan is a living document and needs to reflect the needs of your organization as well as possible. It won’t do to simply adopt the first boiler plate you come across and hope that it will work.

Also, be sure that your plan and procedures contain the proper level of detail. You need to spell out things such as who will be on the incident response team, their individual duties during incidents, where the team will meet and where evidence will be stored, who should be contacted and when, how to properly react to different incidents and many other details.

The next, and possibly the most important step in effective incident response is to practice the plan. You can have the most elegantly written security incident response plan in the world, and it is still doomed to fail during an actual incident if the plan is not practiced regularly. In all my years of helping organizations conduct their table top incident response practice sessions, I have never failed to see the process reveal holes in the plan and provide valuable lessons for the team members who participate. The important thing here is to pick real-world incident scenarios and to conduct the practice as close to the way it would actually occur as possible. We like to only inform a minimum number of response personnel in advance, and surprise the bulk of responders with the event just as it would happen if it were real. Of course there is much more to proper incident response planning and practice than I have included here. But this should start your organization along the right path. For more complete information and help with the process, don’t hesitate to contact your MSI representative.

According to the annual State of the Endpoint study, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Lumension, 71 percent of security professionals believe that endpoint security threats have become more difficult to stop or mitigate over the past two years.

…More than 75 percent said mobile devices pose the biggest threat in 2014, up from just 9 percent in 2010, according to Ponemon. Some 68 percent say their mobile devices have been targeted by malware in the past 12 months, yet 46 percent of respondents say they do not manage employee-owned mobile devices.

…And unfortunately, 46 percent of our respondents report no efforts are in place to secure them.”

…While 40 percent report they were a victim of a targeted attack in the past year, another 25 percent say they aren’t sure if they have been, which suggests that many organizations don’t have security mechanisms in place to detect such an attack, the study says. For those that have experienced such an attack, spear-phishing emails sent to employees were identified as the No. 1 attack entry point.

…The survey found that 41 percent say they experience more than 50 malware attacks a month, up 15 percent from those that reported that amount three years ago. And malware attacks are costly, with 50 percent saying their operating expenses are increasing and 67 percent saying malware attacks significantly contributed to that rising expense.

Organizations are still struggling with secure architectures and enclaving, and since that is true, BYOD and visiblility/prevention efforts on end-points are a growing area of frustration.

Organizations that focus on secure architectures and enclaving will have quicker wins

Organizations with the ability to do nuance detection for enclaved systems will have quicker wins

Organizations are still focusing on prevention as a primary control, many of them are seriously neglecting detection and response as control families

Organizations that embrace a balance of prevention/detection/response control families will have quicker wins

Organizations are still struggling in communicating to management and the user population why end-point security is critical to long term success

Many organizations continue to struggle with creating marketing-based messaging for socialization of their security mission

If you would like to discuss some or all of these ideas, feel free to ping me on Twitter (@lbhuston) or drop me an email. MSI is working with a variety of companies on solutions to these problems and we can certainly share what we have learned with your organization as well.

“Consumer use of the cloud”; in a phrase, is how the cloud will leak into your enterprise, whether you like it or not. Already, IT is struggling with how to manage the consumer use of devices and services in the enterprise. Skype/VoIP and WIFI were the warning shots, but the BlackBerry, iPhone, iPad and other consumer devices are the death nail for centralized IT (and IS) control.

Consumer electronics, backed by a wide array of free or low cost cloud services, are a new frontier for your organization. Services like MobileMe, DropBox, various file sharing tools and remote access services like GoToMyPC, et al. have arrived. Likely, they are in use in your environment today. Consumers use and leverage these services as a part of their increasingly de-centralized online life. Even with sites like Twitter and FaceBook growing in capability and attention, consumers grow their use, both personally and professionally of services “in the cloud”. Make no mistake, despite your controls at the corporate firewalls, consumers are using their mobile and pocket devices and a variety of these services. Unless you are searching them at the door and blocking cell phone use in your business, they are there.

This might not be “the cloud” that your server admins are worrying about. It might not represent all of the off-site system, database and other hosting tools they are focused on right now, but make no mistake, this consumer version of the cloud has all, if not more, of the same issues and concerns. Questions about your data is managed, secured and maintained all abound.

Given the “gadget posture” of most organizations and their user communities, this is not likely to be something that technical controls can adequately respond to. The consumer cloud services are too dynamic and widespread for black listing approaches to contain them. Plus, they obviously lack centralized choke points like in the old days of “network perimeter security”. The new solution, however, is familiar. Organizations must embrace policies and processes to cover these technologies and their issues. They also have to embrace education and awareness training around these topics with their user base. Those who think that denial and black listing can solve this problem are gravely mistaken. The backdoor cloud consumer movement into your organization is already present, strong and embedded. Teaching users to be focused on safe use of these services will hopefully reduce your risk, and theirs.

Just a quick note on the recent Google announcement about dumping Windows for desktops in favor of Linux and Mac OS X. As you can see from the linked article, there is a lot of hype about this move in the press.

Unfortunately, dumping Windows as a risk reducer is just plain silly. It’s not which OS your users use, but how safely they use it. If a user is going to make the same “bad computing hygiene” choices, they are going to get p0wned, regardless of their OS. Malware, Trojans and a variety of attacks exist for most every, if not every, platform. Many similar brower-based attacks exist across Windows, Linux and OS X. These are the attack patterns of today, not the Slammer and Code Red worm attack patterns of days gone by.

I fail to see how changing OS will have any serious impact on organizational risk. Perhaps it will decrease, a very small amount, the costs associated with old-school spyware and worms, but this, in my opinion is likely to be a decreasing return. Over time, attackers are getting better at cross platform exploitation and users are likely to quickly feel a false sense of security from their OS choice and make even more bad decisions. Combine these, and then multiply the costs of additional support calls to the help desk as users get comfortable and have configuration issues in the enterprise, and it seems to me to be a losing gambit.

Time will tell, but I think this was a pretty silly move and one that should be studied carefully before being mirrored by other firms.

Yesterday, we were proud to announce a new service offering and process from MSI. This is a new approach to threat modeling that allows organizations to proactively model their threat exposures and the changes in their risk posture, before an infrastructure change is made, a new business operation is launched, a new application is deployed or other IT risk impacts occur.

Using our HoneyPoint technology, organizations can effectively model new business processes, applications or infrastructure changes and then deploy the emulated services in their real world risk environments. Now, for the first time ever, organizations can establish real-world threat models and risk conditions BEFORE they invest in application development, new products or make changes to their firewalls and other security tools.

Even more impressive is that the process generates real-world risk metrics that include frequency of interaction with services, frequency of interaction with various controls, frequency of interaction with emulated vulnerabilities, human attackers versus automated tools, insight into attacker capabilities, focus and intent! No longer will organizations be forced to guess at their threat models, now they can establish them with defendable, real world values!

Much of the data created by this process can be plugged directly into existing risk management systems, risk assessment tools and methodologies. Real-world values can be established for many of the variables and other metrics, that in the past have been decided by “estimation”.

Truly, if RISK = THREAT X VULNERABILITY, then this new process can establish that THREAT variable for you, even before typical security tools like scanners, code reviews and penetration testing have a rough implementation to work against to measure VULNERABILITY. Our new process can be used to model threats, even before a single line of real code has been written – while the project is still in the decision or concept phases!

We presented this material at the local ISSA chapter meeting yesterday. The slides are available here:

Give us a call and schedule a time to discuss this new capability with an engineer. If your organization is ready to add some maturity and true insight into its risk management and risk assessment processes, then this just might be what you have been waiting for.